How to rotate the screen on Windows 10

Most Windows 10 users upgraded from Windows 7. Windows 10 is very different from Windows 7 with respect to its UI and there’s also the new Settings app to get used to. Apart from these changes, some keyboard shortcuts don’t work any more. On Windows 7, you could rotate your screen with keyboard shortcuts but that no longer works on Windows 10. If you need to rotate the screen on Windows 10, you have to go through the Settings app.

Rotate the screen

Open the Settings app and go to the System group of settings. Go to the Display tab. If you have multiple displays you need to first select the display you want to rotate. The rotate setting is display specific.

Scroll down and look for the Orientation dropdown. It has four options; Landscape, Portrait, Landscape (flipped), and Portrait (flipped). Landscape and Portrait are simple enough to understand and the flipped options are closely related. Landscape (flipped) will give you an upside down screen whereas Portrait (flipped) will interchange right with left.

On Windows 7, you could rotate the screen freely with the Ctrl+Alt+Left Arrow keyboard shortcut and this meant you could rotate it by 90, 180, or 270 degrees. The keyboard shortcut no longer works on Windows 10 and you have the Orientation dropdown instead.

One problem with the screen rotation feature on Windows 7 was that it would rotate your screen without any prompt. Many users who didn’t know this feature existed were suddenly unable to use their system until they figured out what had gone wrong. On Windows 10, you get a little prompt asking if you want to keep the new orientation. If you don’t respond within 12 seconds, the change is reverted. As far as accidental screen rotations go, it’s probably a good thing that Windows 10 got rid of the keyboard shortcut which could, and was, often accidentally executed.

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The new rotate features don’t leave any orientations out of the mix. You get all the same ones you had on Windows 7. The flipped orientations are the ones you’re looking for if you can’t find the one you want.

The mouse movement conforms to the new display orientation. If you select the Portrait orientation, moving your mouse up which would normally move it to the top of the monitor, will instead move it to the new top that is defined on your screen. It’s going to take a good amount of practice to get used to mouse cursor movements with a rotated screen, and if you have a multi-monitor display, it might be a bit more difficult to figure out. Screen orientations are not reset when you restart your system.